The Coalition is Killing the Liberal Party
Especially in Queensland, the L needs to free itself from the NP
A version of this article was first published in Pearls and Irritations.
When the Liberal and National parties of Queensland merged in 2008 to form the Liberal National Party (Queensland), I did not give it much thought. I had just moved from Sydney to Canberra to start a PhD at the Australian National University and dismissed the merger as just another form of Queensland exceptionalism. I do remember, however, that the Liberals’ second most successful prime minister, John Howard, was against the merger.
Having lived in regional Queensland for 6 years, first in Rockhampton, now Townsville, my perspective has changed. The merger was pragmatic and it made sense for the main non-Labor parties to share resources and have a united strategy. Within it all, the L in the LNP has eroded to the point where at times it is invisible. The extent of this identity loss was obscured when the Liberal Party had Sydney-based leaders, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, then Scott Morrison.
Peter Dutton was the first Liberal leader to represent a Queensland electorate and the first to be a member of the LNP. Under his watch, the Liberal Party have continued to lose formerly blue ribbon seats, both to Labor and to community independents, and have been largely wiped out of urban Australia.
One has to wonder, when Dutton spoke about his base and party’s values, who and where was he thinking?
Following Anthony Albanese’s narrow victory in 2022 that brought Labor to power, the Nationals were quick to point out that they had largely held their seats and primary vote while the casualties had been moderate Liberals holding urban seats in Sydney and Melbourne. This was used to suggest that more conservative positions, especially on climate change and social issues, was the winning formulae.
The obvious flaw in this logic was that the Coalition’s only path to victory would involve winning back city and suburban seats and reflecting on the reasons they had lost them. Emboldened by Donald Trump’s election victory in the United States, Dutton convinced himself that there was a silent majority of ‘quiet Australians’ who would be won over by culture wars and that promises to fire public servants somehow substituted for policy.
The strength of the LNP in Queensland seemingly blinded him to the extent to which the Liberal part of the Coalition was losing voters in droves, especially Millennials in Gen Z.
At state level, the LNP merger has not, so far at least, resulted in much election success. Its first outing in 2009 under Lawernce Springborg saw it improve its position but was soundly beaten by Anna Bligh, despite Labor having been in power since 1989. The LNP finally won in 2012 with Campbell Newman at the helm only to return to opposition at the next election in 2015. It lost again in 2017 and 2020 before winning the 2024 election.
At federal level, the LNP have performed better. Since its formation, the LNP have always won at least 21 of Queensland’s 30 seats. The 2025 election has exposed weaknesses, however, with the LNP only likely to retain 15. Again, the conservative factions of the party will point to the blue wall that extends over most of regional Queensland but this obscures the extent to which support for the Liberals has eroded.
The advantage of having a separate Liberal and National party was that it allowed both to foster a unique image and identity. In Queensland, especially, the Nationals were able to appeal to populism and push a more resolutely conservative agenda, especially on social issues.
The merger has felt far more like the Liberals joining the party of Joh Bjelke-Petersen than the Nationals joining the party of Robert Menzies.
Far-right figures like George Christensen and Matt Canavan openly attacked their own government when led by Malcolm Turnbull and even under the more conservative Scott Morrison over issues such as COVID-19 vaccinations and policies. Whereas, pre-merger, these two might have been dismissed as the Fox News intelligentsia of the Nationals, as LNP members they damaged the Liberal brand, even if they sat in the Nationals party room.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price offers another example of how the merger of conservative parties has helped the Nationals at the expense of the Liberals. Like Queensland’s LNP, the Country Liberal Party of the Northern Territory is the result of a merger between the main non-Labor parties. Price was propelled to prominence by Dutton as a leading campaigner against the Voice referendum. In the 2025 election campaign she took her prompts from the US promising to reduce government waste and ‘make Australia great again’. Following the election she defected from the National to the Liberal party room blurring the lines further.
Long gone are the days where this might have only made local news in the Northern Territory. In the digital age, outlandish comments from CLP or LNP backbenchers (or shadow ministers in Price’s case) will be published in online articles and read on smart phones in Sydney, Melbourne, and other capital cities. Few will expend much energy asking which party room the provocateur sits in.
I’m certainly not suggesting that the Nationals have a monopoly on far-right populism. South Australian Liberal senator Alex Antic, moves in the same intellectual circles as Canavan and Price, so too many in the National Right faction of the party. Regardless, the formal merger of the Liberals and Nationals in Queensland does appear to have damaged the Liberal side.
What do former Liberal prime ministers, Turnbull, Abbott, Howard, and Robert Menzies have in common? The Liberal party has lost all of their old seats. Holt, Gorton, and McMahon can be added to the list too, although their seats do not exist anymore, they were based in metropolitan Melbourne which has almost entirely abandoned the Liberals. And of course, Dutton’s seat of Dickson has been lost too.
Historically, the non-Labor forces have always needed to collaborate to gain power. But with a common enemy rather than a common goal, the conservative parties have needed to periodically reinvent themselves, from the Commonwealth Liberals, to the Nationalists, the United Australia Party (not Clive Palmer’s poor imitation) and since 1944, the Liberal Party.
There is no small irony, that the real forgotten people of Australian politics are educated, urban (former) Liberal voters and they have made their dissatisfaction with the party clearly heard by supporting Teal independents in many formerly safe Liberal seats.
While it may seem dramatic, it may be that a new conservative party needs to be formed, one that takes a measured view to the challenge of climate change (as the UK Conservatives have done), one that openly embraces multiculturalism (like Canada’s Conservatives), one that is not seen as a boys club, one that takes seriously the challenges faced by young Australians, and one that is willing to do the hard work of policy formation, rather than appealing to populism for cheap votes.
If not a new party, the Liberals need to rediscover the political centre and reenergise its moderate faction which has too readily ceded the floor to the right. Crucially, Queensland Liberals would do well to consider if the LNP merger has really had any benefit beyond bolstering the Nationals. The damage done in Sydney, Melbourne, and even in Brisbane, of blurring the identities of the two parties will take years to undo.